I use SBM (smart boot manager) and love it. You can install it from a dos floppy. It allows you to boot any OS on any partition on your disk (with a boot sector, of course). Note that M$ systems are so crippled the c: drive must be a primary partition.

yep, that's definitely a lilo error message. this is why i personally use grub. what i would do is boot from a livecd distribution or what-not (ie: gentoo live cd, or knoppix), and install grub with it. from there, use grub as your boot loader and you should be fine. in order to write grub to your MBR, you will need to type grub into the console, then do setup (hd0,0) in order to write the mbr to /dev/hda. i really don't know how with lilo.

good luck, i strongly suggest using grub, because i've had my linux partition do exactly what you described here multiple times using lilo, but never messed up with grub.

I tried fixboot, fixmbr, fdisk /mbr, the WinXP recovery console, BootMagic, and the Linux recovery w/ Mandrake. Nothing would repair the error, so I went the easy way...I bought a new HD. I needed a new one anyway, so this was a good excuse.

Now I just hope that putting my old C: on as F: will allow me to copy my important files and then I'll just format and have a nice size secondary hd.

So thanks to everyone for the help.

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